Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

This is a book within a book. Susan Ryeland is an editor for Cloverleaf Books. Susan receives the 9th book, and last book, of a mystery series written by Alan Conway. The main character of the series is a German detective by the name of Atticus Pund, who solves mysteries in quaint English villages. The first couple hundred pages of Magpie Murders is actually Alan Conway's mystery called "Magpie Murders". We are reading it along with Susan. The book comes to an abrupt end though because the last chapter(s) of the book are missing. Then Susan finds out that Alan Conway, the author, is dead, presumably by suicide because he found out he was dying.

The second part of the book involves Susan playing the amateur detective. She doesn't believe that Alan committed suicide, so she tries to figure out who killed him and why. She also wants to find the missing chapter(s) of Alan's final book, since she notices a lot of parallels between Atticus Pund and Alan Conway. (Atticus Pund finds out he is dying as well, so this will be his last chance at detective work). In addition to that, there is a financial concern for Cloverleaf Books if Susan and her boss, Charles Clover (CEO), cannot publish this final Atticus Pund book, which they can't do if they can't find the missing chapters.

The two stories intertwine because Alan uses people and places (with names cleverly re-named) that are familiar to him. Alan's sister mentions to Susan a couple of times that Alan had a fascination with puzzles, clues and word games since he was a child. So Susan tries to put all the pieces together to solve Alan's presumed murder, as well as the murderer(s) of the two characters in Alan's book, since Susan thinks the storyline and the missing chapters of the book hold the answer to solving Alan's murder. Confused yet? ;)

It does get a bit confusing! Since there are parallel characters in the two "books", with different names in different settings with a different storyline, I found myself having to think through the characters. Susan is trying to solve all the murders, both in "real time" and the fictional ones that Atticus Pund was solving in the book. It is cleverly plotted and there are word games involved. Alan Conway, who is bitter about becoming famous for writing mystery novels when all he ever wanted to do was write literary novels (which were really quite terrible), plays games with his readers in all nine books in the series.

It was an entertaining read with an interesting ending, which I won't spoil here. It's not what I expected, but it's more realistic than a fairy tale ending.

Wendy's Rating: ****